Are Blogs Now News Sources? Google Thinks So

Blogs as “news” or “news resources” is still a hotly debatable point. Most blogs merely rehash the news with opinions and conjecture. A few actually report the news though, which challenges the fine line between “blogger” and “journalist”. The line is now fairly blurry as journalists are blogging and bloggers are hunting, investigating, researching, and delivering the news.

The part that bothers most professionals is that journalists have a fairly solid code of ethics and standards, as well as policies in place to protect and defend their rights. Bloggers don’t. They have freedom of speech, but even that is debatable as freedom of speech is not a “right” in many countries around the world. Speaking out can get you killed.

I noticed this today. It’s good for the blogs, less so for the news manufacturers who see yet another slice of their cake perhaps not yet being eaten, but at least moved farther down the table.
Personally, I think it’s useful. I have my address bar in Firefox set to search Google and now I don’t have to make that extra click around to Google’s Blog Search. Less bookmarks, more productivity – or say they say.
Then again, I never used GBS – if searching blogs I still always went for Technorati or the cool 9rules search ;-)

Journalists are simply afraid of being marginalized. If they weren’t so biased and controlled by stockholders, driven by profit, maybe people would have more faith in mainstream media. People are smart enough of to decide where they get their news. Let the issue sort itself out on it’s own. In the long run a happy median will rise to the top.

The point about “rehashing” is exactly why I haven’t looked at Google News in a long time now. Google News has been including some blogs in news results for a while and since then I’ve figured it was time to stop depending on Google for news. Heck, we even got blogospherenews.com listed as a source… thats when you start wondering.

It seems pretty unanimous here, and I’m not gonna rock the boat with my vote either. Since I discovered blogs, I’ve always sought out those with personality and/or enlightening tips about my interests. In most cases the timeliness doesn’t even matter much to me.

For my news sources, however, I hope for less personality, to be replaced by dry but factual reporting. And of course the timeliness of a news source is all-important.

So, yeah, good for us bloggers search-wise, bad for people looking for reliable news from us bloggers.

Here is an excellent example of why including blogs isn’t good for those of us looking for breaking news; to monitor emerging public health issues; to identify public perceptions for risk communication; [the feds will not report the bird test results back to us directly. If it weren’t for news coverage elsewhere we wouldn’t know for weeks.] etc.

The first below is to a new news story (which I had picked up via my morning LA Times Email sub the day before). The second, which seems to indicate another story or source of info, is actually the entire first story inserted (stolen) into the personal blog. I did find it very useful earlier this year to rely on Google news alerts just to see how widespread our little birds were becoming known (The Birds!) (Google news proxy measure — H5N1 public involvement)
====================================
Subject: Google Alert – kuskokwim flu

KTLA The CW | Where Los Angeles Lives | Alaska villagers living in …
Alaska villagers living in bird flu’s flight path … The flatland that
spreads out between the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers is so riddled with lakes
and …

Inolesco: growth of the avian flu
One of the countries reporting no deaths from avian flu. … The flatland
that spreads out between the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers is so riddled with
lakes …

There is (or should be) a difference between journalism and blogs as news sources. News from most traditional media sources have an established set of values for integrity, reliability, etc.
Blog-journo’s still have to “prove” their quality before being taken serious as news sources.
(And yes, you can debate about the quality of certain traditional news outlets, the Enquirer example is obvious, but it really is an established set – you know what you’re getting ;))
Pay-per-post and other marketing related instruments are starting to have their impact on blogs, but these things apply for “normal” journalism too (chequebook journalism).
I guess it’s a matter of time before more and more blog-journo’s start counting as reliable news sources, but we’ll have to let the process of scrutiny and evaluation run its course.

Why shouldn’t blogs be “news sources”? The news about Google’s acquisition of YouTube was broken by Mike Arrington at TechCrunch; OK, that story still went to the WSJ (I believe) for verification before being hailed as “true”, but the next Big News Story from TechCrunch probably won’t need verifying by a mainstream media source, because TechCrunch’s “trustworthiness” as a news source has been established. The difficulty, because of the sheer number of blogs, is finding a signal inside the noise…

Here is more (not to beat a dead bird, but the promulgation of “news”, especially regarding public health, which is cr* is not to be poo-pooed). There are other issues re: mass media, public health, cultural stereotyping, etc. but the focus here is today’s Google news alert —

Subject: Google Alert – alaska bird flu

BIRD FLU ‘CANARIES’ IN ALASKA
Free Market News Network – Pompano Beach,FL,USA
… haven’t gotten tired of hearing about the coming threat of avian flu in America … story from the weekend, pointing at an isolated native tribe in Alaska who might …

This “Google news alert” leads to “news” which leads to “blog” about Alaska Natives being experimented upon by governmental doctors (using people as “canaries” for the bird flu) and hunters spreading the bird flu. [the original is still the peculiar LA Times/ KTLA news story]

We don’t need yet another “government medical experiment on natives” as either Googled “news” or as “blog revelation”.

We could use more revelations about dangerous federal, state, local, tribal, academic ineptitude via blogs (http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/) or in-depth news reporting. These should be alerted by Google– Google News and Google Blog Search, separately.

When Google (trusted mega-corp.) moves items from the loonie bins into “news”, the effects are not trivial.